A place for a tired old woman to try to figure things out so that the world makes a bit of sense.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

More Unsurprising News

After years of funding "abstinence only" sex education for teens, the teen pregnancy rate has gone up for the first time in at least ten years. While other factors are certainly involved, the fact that concrete and effective programs to prevent young women from getting pregnant have been hamstrung by the Religious Reich certainly played a major role.

The pregnancy rate among teenage girls in the United States has jumped for the first time in more than a decade, raising alarm that the long campaign to reduce motherhood among adolescents is faltering, according to a report released Tuesday.

The pregnancy rate among 15-to-19-year-olds increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 -- the first jump since 1990, according to an analysis of the most recent data collected by the federal government and the nation's leading reproductive-health think tank. ...

Even WaPo acknowledges the trend to deny our kids with solid and reliable education on contraceptive devices such as condoms and the birth control pill plays a significant role, although the other factors are mentioned as if in a nod to the right:

The cause of the increase is the subject of debate. Several experts blamed the increase in teen pregnancies on sex-education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence. Others said the reversal could be due to a variety of factors, including an increase in poverty, an influx of Hispanics and complacency about AIDS, prompting lax use of birth control such as condoms.

Now that's an interesting list, isn't it?

The country had been making remarkable strides in reducing the number of teen mothers by focusing on all kids of prevention options until the no-sexers grabbed control. What is especially disheartening about all this is that with the rise in pregnancy rates among teenage women has come a rise in sexually transmitted disease among both teen sexes, a rise that hasn't been completely tracked because the kids don't have enough knowledge about those diseases to get to a doctor when the first symptoms occur.